ROBERT LYMAN

Robert Lyman was born in New Zealand and educated at Scotch College, Melbourne, Australia. He was an officer in the British Army for twenty years, being commissioned into the Light Infantry from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in April 1982. He has a First Class Honours degree in History from the University of York; Masters degrees in Strategic Studies (University College of Wales, Aberystwyth), War Studies (King’s College, London) and Military Studies (Cranfield). He is a graduate of the Joint Services Command and Staff College. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2009. A critically acclaimed historian, his interest to date has been the experience of both warfare and of military command during the Second World War, producing narrative studies that explore campaigns in the Middle East, Far East and North Africa.

His Under A Darkening Sky - Americans at War, 1939-1941 will be published by Pegasus in the US in 2018.

Flying the notorious 'hump route' between India and China in 1943, a twin- engine plane suffered mechanical failure and crashed in a dense mountain jungle. Among the passengers and crew were celebrated CBS journalist Eric Sevareid, a Soviet double-agent posing as an OSS operative, and General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's personal political adviser. Against the odds, all but one of the twenty-one people aboard the aircraft survived-but they fell from the frying pan into the fire. They landed in wild countryside dominated by the Nagas, notorious headhunters who routinely practiced slavery and human sacrifice. Japanese soldiers lay close by, too, with their own brand of hatred for Americans. Among the Headhunters is the first account of this incredible story.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Among the Headhunters (Da Capo, Hachette USA 2016); The Real X-Men: The Heroic Story of the Underwater War 1942-1945, (Quercus, 2015); Jail Busters: The Secret Story of MI6, the French Resistance and Operation Jericho (Quercus, 2014; Ixelles,France 2014); Into the Jaws of Death, Transworld, 2013. Operation Suicide: The Remarkable story of the Cockleshell Raid (Quercus,2012; Ixelles, France 2012); Japan’s Last Bid for Glory- The Invasion of India 1944 (Pen & Sword, 2011). The Longest Siege: Tobruk and the Battle for Africa, 1941Pan Macmillan, 2009. The Generals: From Defeat to Victory Leadership in Asia 1941-45 Constable and Robinson, 2008.Slim, Master of War, Constable and Robinson, 2004. First Victory, Britain’s Forgotten Struggle in the Middle East, 1941Constable and Robinson, 2006. Iraq 1941: The Battles for Basra, Habbaniya, Fallujah and Baghdad, Osprey Publishing, 2006.
Contributing chapter to The Challenges of High Command: The British Experience Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Forward to David Rooney’s Stilwell The Patriot, Greenhill Books, 2005.